To the Editor:—The two serious diseases which were found prevalent in the -histories of the Negro sharecroppers were gonorrhea and malaria. All these subjects had been under medical care and, as far as one could determine, had been cured. That they had been adequately treated and had recovered is not deplorable. Two subjects showed positive Wassermann reactions, and 1 of these was not a sharecropper. However, accepting the figure of 8 per cent, Roberts and Williams (South. M. J.30:458 [May] 1937) report an incidence of 11.7 per cent in the white population of Gibson County in Tennessee, and Usilton (Ven. Dis. Inform.16:147 [May] 1935) estimates that 8 per cent of males from 20 to 30 years of age contract syphilis. I cannot regret the fact that the figure for the Negroes is, if anything, lower than that for the white population. That the cardiac and respiratory signs found on clinical